17

New York City

Artie Zuboric said, ‘It was a brilliant plan, Frank. It was probably the most brilliant plan I’ve ever been associated with. When I’m an old man looking back I’ll remember it with total fucking admiration. I’ll gather my grandchildren up on my lap and tell them about the day Frank Pagan tried to catch an Irish gunman.’

Pagan flexed his bruised fingers. He didn’t like sarcasm at the best of times and he found Zuboric’s brand particularly juvenile. His hand stung. He rubbed it gently, then stared from the window of Zuboric’s office.

‘You had a clear shot at him,’ Zuboric said. ‘When he was standing there on that landing, Frank, you could have taken him out. You had all the time in the world.’

And on the roof-top too, Pagan thought. But he hadn’t narrated the chase to Zuboric in any detail. He’d fogged the pursuit through the basement, not because he thought it embarrassing but because he wasn’t about to throw more fuel on Artie’s little bonfire of sarcasm.

‘Granted he moved like lightning,’ Zuboric said. ‘Granted it was unexpected. But that doesn’t excuse you, Frank. If I’d had the same opportunity, I’d have pulled my trigger. But I was knocked on my ass when Tumulty crashed into me. So I didn’t have a shot. You bombed, Frank. You screwed up.’

Pagan watched the street, where a shaft of gloomy March sunlight penetrated the greyness of things. What he kept coming back to was Jig’s smile on the roof-top, the moment when the man had turned and glanced back and the smile on his lips was somehow knowing, as if Jig understood that Frank Pagan wasn’t going to shoot him in the back. But that wasn’t it either, it wasn’t anything so sentimental, so nice, as an unwillingness to shoot a defenceless human being. It was something else. It had nothing to do with any concept of fair play.

He had never dreamed of taking Jig dead, that’s what it came down to. Even if he had never entirely admitted it to himself before now, he had always imagined Jig alive, intact. He had always envisaged himself looking Jig straight in the eye and taking the measure of the man, talking to him, questioning him, as if there were some revelation to be found in the mystery of Jig’s soul. He wanted an understanding of the assassin, something you couldn’t get from a dead man. He wanted to know Jig, who played the game of terrorism according to his own meticulous rules. It was his appreciation of Jig’s calculated acts of violence, so economic and accurate, that made it difficult to gun the man down in cold blood. And if there was irony in this, in his unwillingness to meet Jig’s violence with violence of his own, Pagan wasn’t going to recognise it. He wanted Jig badly, but not dead. Not shipped back to England in a bloody box, which would have been an empty triumph.

There was even something admirable, Pagan thought, in the fact that Jig, during that first visit to St. Finbar’s, had actually approached Pagan to ask if he could help. There was gall in the man, and bravado, and surely an overwhelming sense of confidence. To come straight up to Pagan and look him in the eye the way he’d done – it was quite an act.

Pagan rubbed his aching hand again. He wondered if he was simply trying to rationalise his own failure, trying to explain it away in manageable sentiments. He thought suddenly of Eddie Rattigan’s bomb and how it had destroyed Roxanne, and he realised that what he felt towards Jig was almost a kind of gratitude for the fact that the assassin had introduced dignity into the whole Irish conflict, that he had transcended the brutal behaviour of the Eddie Rattigans of this world. He thought of the enormous gulf that separated somebody like Rattigan from Jig. Rattigan killed the innocent, the blameless, the harmless bystander. Jig would never have casually detonated a bomb at a public bus-stop. He would never have indulged in such mindless destruction. He would never have taken Roxanne away. You didn’t shoot a man like Jig in the back. ‘I want him alive. That’s all.’

‘You could’ve shot to wound,’ Zuboric snapped. ‘You ever think about that?’

Pagan didn’t respond. He considered the two shots he’d fired at Jig on the roof-tops. The first had been a warning, fired in the vague chance that Jig would stop running. Vague indeed. The second had gone close to Jig, but Pagan wasn’t sure now if that bullet had been intended to wound the man. In the heat of the moment, in the confusion of the chase, he hadn’t had time to take careful aim.

Zuboric said, ‘I get this sneaky feeling you’ve been after Jig too long. I think you’ve actually begun to admire the sonofabitch. You want him alive because you can’t understand what makes you admire him, so you’d like to sit down with him over tea and crumpets and tell him what a jolly good fight he’s fought. It wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened to a cop.’

‘Call me unpatriotic, but I don’t eat crumpets,’ Pagan said. He was remembering the basement, the moment of contact when Jig, finding the means of escape in a coal-chute, had finally lunged out at him with his foot. He’d almost had Jig then. Almost. A coal-chute! It was extraordinary how people who wanted desperately to survive somehow always managed to find the means of survival in the basic material around them. Somebody other than Jig, somebody with less of the sharp instinct to escape, might never have found that opening in the basement. Chalk up another point for the man, Pagan thought. Did that wonderment at Jig’s ability, his slipperiness, constitute admiration?

Zuboric stared at Pagan. He was beginning to perceive his life in terms of how much the Englishman irritated him. The prospect of calling The Director with news of the Canal Street Fuck-Up, which was like a newspaper headline in his mind, made him very unhappy. He had been putting it off ever since they’d come back to his office. Why had he ever listened to Pagan anyway? He was suddenly very weary. Of his office, his job, the Bureau, the whole ball of wax. And last night, when he’d been in bed with Charity, who always made the act of sex seem like an enormous favour on her part, she’d once again reiterated her determination never to marry anyone who didn’t have two cents to rub together. Especially a man connected with any law enforcement outfit. She’d had her share, she said, of deadbeats in the past. Zuboric hadn’t wanted to hear about her past particularly. It was the future he was interested in, and it was going to be a wintry future if Charity wasn’t in it. She had driven him last night to the limits of sexual bliss. He didn’t like to wonder how she’d learned some of the tricks she knew.

He picked up a pen and rapped it on his desk, still staring at the Englishman. ‘As for Tumulty, I knew that cocksucker couldn’t be trusted,’ Zuboric said. ‘I knew it all along.’

‘You told me that,’ Pagan answered. ‘You were very happy to tell me that, Arthur.’

‘Jesus, Frank. I saw the guy slip something into Jig’s hand. I don’t know what exactly. A piece of paper. Something. I was standing in the goddam doorway watching.’

Pagan closed his eyes. His entire body hurt from the exertion of roof-top acrobatics. He was thinking of Tumulty now, whom they had brought back to Zuboric’s office from Canal Street. Father Joe was locked inside a cell along the corridor. He claimed that Zuboric was imagining things, there was no piece of paper, nothing. Maybe it was time to turn the screws on Joe a little tighter.

‘I’ll talk to him again,’ Pagan said.

Zuboric shrugged and tossed a key into Pagan’s hand. ‘Be my guest. In the meantime, I’ve got the unpleasant task of reporting this failure, Frank. If you don’t see me again, it’s because I’ve been abruptly transferred to Carlsbad, New Mexico.’

‘I’ll come and visit you,’ Pagan said in the doorway. ‘I’ve always wanted to see the bat caves.’

‘I bet,’ Zuboric replied, thinking that the caves of Carlsbad would be a perfectly fitting place for Frank Pagan to die and be buried in, under a million tons of bat shit. ‘After you’ve talked to Tumulty, do me a favour and make sure you lock the door behind you, huh? We wouldn’t want to lose two Irishmen in one day, would we?’

Frank Pagan slid the key in the lock and stepped inside the room where Joe Tumulty sat propped up in the corner. Zuboric’s last remark niggled him. He suddenly wished he’d shot Jig on the roof when he’d had the chance. Who the hell would have cared anyway in the long run other than himself? He’d have been a hero. The Man Who Killed Jig. So what the fuck was he doing, dickering with this appreciation of his prey? What was this bullshit about wanting Jig alive? If he’d gunned the Irishman down he wouldn’t have had to put up with Zuboric’s snide comments.

‘You really let me down, Joe.’ He spoke between clenched teeth. He felt confined inside a triangle whose sides consisted of Zuboric’s criticism, Tumulty’s pigheadedness, and his own failure to apprehend Jig. He wasn’t in the mood to fart around with Tumulty.

Tumulty didn’t speak. Pagan squatted alongside him. The priest blinked, then closed his eyes slowly.

‘What was written on the paper, Joe?’

‘There was no bloody paper.’

‘My arse. Zuboric saw you.’

‘Look. I said the grace you wanted. I put the finger on your man. Don’t blame me if he slipped out of your hands. I did everything you expected, so why the hell am I locked up like this?’

Pagan placed his hand on Tumulty’s shoulder. ‘You’re locked up because you’re a fucking criminal, Joe. You impeded the investigation of a Federal agency. I bet you just loved it when Jig pushed you into Zuboric, didn’t you? I bet you loved making that little contribution to Jig’s escape.’

‘I made no contribution,’ Tumulty said.

‘What was on the paper?’

‘I’d like to call a lawyer.’

‘No lawyer,’ Pagan said.

‘It’s my constitutional right.’

‘What right? What constitution? You don’t have any rights, Joe. You signed them all away when you helped Jig.’

‘There’s something to the effect that a man’s innocent until he’s proven guilty –’

‘Where did you hear a fairy tale like that?’

Tumulty sighed. ‘Thank God this is a country of litigation and hungry lawyers. I’ll sue. You’ll see.’

Pagan smiled. ‘What was on the paper, Joe?’

Tumulty shut his eyes again. He tipped his face to one side, away from Pagan. Pagan reached out and deftly took Joe’s cheek between thumb and forefinger and pinched very hard. Tumulty’s eyes watered before Pagan released his grip.

Pagan stood up. ‘I’ll tell you what really bothers me about all this, Joe. It isn’t the fact that you’ll probably go to jail. It’s the end of the road for all that good work you’ve been doing down on Canal Street. It’s curtain time, folks. No more good works. No more charity. You’ve lost your little bid for sainthood, Joe. Pity.’

‘There isn’t a court in the country that would send me to jail,’ Tumulty said, rubbing his cheek and looking annoyed.

Pagan shrugged. ‘Even if you don’t go to jail, your life’s going to be sheer hell, Joe. You know what Zuboric is planning?’

Tumulty shook his head.

‘First, he’s contacting some friends in the IRS who owe him a favour. You know how that works. Zuboric reckons his tax pals can hassle you so much you’ll wish you’d been sent to prison. That’s for starters. Second, he’s going to arrange for the local health department to go through your establishment hunting for sanitary violations. They also owe Zuboric favours. In other words, they’re going to be hard on you.’ Pagan paused. He wasn’t absolutely sure if Tumulty was absorbing this. ‘I’m not finished yet. He’s also making arrangements to bring the local cops down on you.’

‘He can’t do that.’

‘He can do anything he likes. The Director of the FBI is God, which makes Artie Zuboric a minor kind of deity by association. He asks for something in this town, everybody is ready to just bloody jump for him. You’ll see. As far as the cops coming in, it seems they’re going to suspect some of your clients of carrying narcotic contraband and using your place as the source, as it were, of their deals. Suddenly, no more St. Finbar’s. Big headlines. Lapsed Priest Runs Drug Ring. Tabloids love anything to do with lapsed priests, don’t they?’

Tumulty said, ‘This is blackmail.’

‘Hardly, Joe. All I’m doing is painting you a picture of your dilemma. Bleak days lie ahead. Unless, of course, you decide that cooperation is the best way to go.’

The priest stood up. He studied Frank Pagan a moment. Then, very deliberately, he said, ‘There was no paper. I gave Jig absolutely nothing.’

‘I admire a man who sticks to his story,’ Pagan said. He turned to the door. ‘Don’t let anybody convince you to change it.’

He went out. He drew a cup of water from the cooler in the corridor and drank it, leaning against the wall and staring at a portrait of Thomas Dawson. He thought Dawson looked vapid, homogenised. But these were the very qualities the American electorate found endearing in its Presidents.

He crumpled his little wax cup. He wondered if Joseph X. Tumulty was pondering the exaggerated portrait of doom Pagan had painted for him. Maybe. God knows, he had to do something to shake Tumulty loose from his posture of innocence.

Pagan moved back in the direction of Zuboric’s office just as the agent, looking as if the heavens had parted and God had roared angrily at him, stepped out into the corridor.

‘I thought you’d be in Carlsbad by now,’ Pagan said.

Zuboric had a sheet of paper in his hand. ‘I just talked with The Director.’

‘And?’

‘He’s angry. He’s angry and goddam impatient. He doesn’t think a whole lot of you, Frank. Quote. If the limey doesn’t shape up, I’ll have him shipped back to England so fast his feet won’t touch the ground. Unquote.’

‘Harsh words,’ Pagan said. He didn’t remotely care what Leonard M. Korn had to say about him.

Zuboric waved the sheet of paper. ‘Which brings me to this tidbit of information he gave me. It seems that a man was murdered early this morning in Albany. He’d been garrotted by a length of wire and dumped in a culvert. A very nasty death.’

‘Garroting can be unpleasant,’ Pagan agreed.

‘The killer called the local FBI office at two A.M. and claimed that the killing had been carried out by the Irish Republican Army.’

‘In Albany? New York?’

Zuboric nodded. ‘My precise reaction, Frank.’

‘It’s a hoax. It has to be.’

‘Also my own first reaction. But it becomes more plausible when you hear about the victim.’ Zuboric read from the paper. ‘Alexander Fitzjohn, aged thirty-eight, resident of Camden, New Jersey. Entered the United States legally from Belfast in August 1984.’

‘Belfast?’ Pagan said. He wondered where this was leading.

‘According to what I’ve got here, Frank, Fitzjohn had once been a member of the Free Ulster Volunteers.’

Pagan reached quickly for the paper. It was covered in Zuboric’s scrawl. He must have taken it all down very quickly over the telephone. ‘It doesn’t add up. It doesn’t make any sense at all. Even if it was some old score being settled, since when has the IRA started to make hits overseas? The Libyans, yes. The Bulgarians, sometimes. But I’ve never heard of the IRA playing that kind of long-distance game.’

‘Maybe there’s a local cell,’ Zuboric said.

‘Maybe.’

Pagan handed the paper back. Zuboric said, ‘There’s another possibility.’

‘Which is?’

‘It could have been Jig.’

Pagan opened his mouth to reply when he heard the sound of Joseph Tumulty banging on the locked door of his room.

Patrick Cairney drove his rented Dodge through the streets of Lower Manhattan. Dressed still in the clothes he’d worn at St. Finbar’s, he realised he’d have to change into something more in keeping with the brand-new vehicle he was driving. When he came to Battery Park he found a secluded place where he could change without being seen. Even when he’d discarded the dirty old clothes and dumped them in a trash container, he felt unclean.

He took out the piece of paper Joe Tumulty had given him. He read it quickly, memorised it, tore the sheet into thin ribbons and tossed them into the wind which ferried them carelessly down towards the river. The name, he thought. It was all he had. No guns. Nothing but the name. What was he supposed to do without a weapon?

As he looked out over Battery Park, he was conscious of the great expanse of the Atlantic beyond Gowanus Bay and The Narrows, and it occurred to him that the tide that rimmed the shores of Staten Island was the same that eventually found its way back to Dingle and Castletown, Galway and Donegal. He listened a moment to the squealing of gulls in the distance, and he wondered about this upsurge of longing that filled him. He’d been in Ireland too long, he thought. It had rubbed off on him, the sentimentality, the emigrant’s yearning.

He didn’t move for a time. His body still shook from the recent effort on the roof-tops of Canal Street. It was the first time in his life he’d ever come close to capture, and he didn’t like the feeling. He’d evaded Frank Pagan in the end, but it was a situation he should never have encountered in the first place. He blamed Tumulty. It should have been possible for Tumulty to warn him not to come inside that bloody soup kitchen. It ought to have been possible for the priest to get some kind of sign to him before he’d taken that first fateful step into the place. But Joe Tumulty, who must have been playing both ends against the middle, had behaved like the deplorable amateur he really was. Why the fuck had Finn put a man like Tumulty in America anyway? Bad judgment on Finn’s part? Or was Tumulty just rusted from inactivity? Cairney, who couldn’t believe that Finn would ever show careless judgment, had no answers to these questions. But he knew one thing for sure – the worst outcome of the whole thing was that Frank Pagan now knew what Jig looked like and the exposure worried Cairney. Suddenly Jig had a face. He had features. Characteristics. He was no longer just a name. His anonymity was gone.

Goddam. Patrick Cairney shut his eyes and let the breeze blow against his skin. For a second he considered aborting the whole thing right then and going back to Ireland and Finn. He thought about telling Finn that his cover, so laboriously assembled and protected, had been shattered. The game could no longer be played by the same rules. What would Finn say? Would Finn simply retire Jig? Put him out to pasture? Patrick Cairney loathed that prospect. He couldn’t stand the idea of Finn patting him on the shoulder and saying that he’d had a good innings but now it was time to close up shop. He’d get the goddam money back! He’d get it back and to hell with the fact that he’d been seen and was now neatly stored in Frank Pagan’s memory. He opened his eyes and took several deep breaths. He realised then that he needed control over his thoughts as much as his actions. What had he been thinking about, for Christ’s sake? Defeat? Retirement? He smiled these notions away. He’d complete the task he’d been sent all this way to do, and nothing, nothing was going to stop him.

He walked back to his car, jammed the key in the ignition and drove away from the park. He went back down through the streets of Lower Manhattan, heading for the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. He was acutely aware of time pressing down on him now. What if Joe Tumulty had given the name to Frank Pagan as well? Inside the tunnel, as if enclosed spaces troubled him, he felt apprehensive. It was the lack of a blueprint that unnerved him, the absence of a concrete plan that concerned him. It was also the realisation that he had no way of knowing what this Nicholas Linney was like and how he was going to receive a caller who had some hard questions to ask and who wanted quick truthful answers.

He was going in blind.

And he didn’t like that idea at all, because every success he’d had in the past had come about as a result of good planning, the kind of planning you did with your eyes wide open and your vision uncluttered.

Bridgehampton, Long Island

Nicholas Linney lobbed the tennis ball over the net to where the plump East German, absurd in white shorts and Nike sneakers and a baggy white shirt, lunged with his racket and missed. It was the East German’s habit to stamp his feet petulantly on the concrete court every time he missed an easy return. Linney, playing at halfthrottle, was bored. But it was necessary every so often, for purely commercial purposes, to entertain these yahoos from behind The Iron Curtain.

‘I think I call quits,’ the East German said.

‘Fine,’ Linney answered.

He walked off the court back towards the house. The East German, Gustav Rasch, came flopping alongside him, his mammaries bouncing up and down.

‘I am perhaps too old a little,’ Rasch said, breathing very hard.

‘You’re not old,’ Linney lied. ‘A little out of shape, maybe.’

Linney stepped on to the terrace. The house he owned in Bridgehampton had cost him 2.7 million dollars three years ago. It was a sprawling structure, the result of various owners adding whimsies of their own to the original dwelling – a greenhouse, a glass-walled breakfast room, servant quarters at the rear. Linney sprawled in a deck-chair. The East German, who had heard that Nicholas Linney’s hospitality was always exciting, plopped into a chaise-longue.

Linney offered him a drink. Grapefruit juice and Tanqueray gin spiked with chopped mint leaves. The breakfast speciality of the house. For quite some time neither man spoke. Linney lit a cigarette and looked across the tennis court. Dead leaves, scraps from last fall, blew in little pockets of air stirred up by the wind.

‘Is a nice house,’ Rasch said.

‘Thank you.’ Linney filled two glasses from a flask, passing one to the East German, who drank as if his life were running out.

Linney put his glass down. Rasch had already finished his drink and was helping himself to another.

‘Now,’ Rasch said, and licked his thick lips. ‘Is important we talk money.’

Linney wanted to talk money, but only on his own terms, and only after Rasch had sampled the pleasures of the house. ‘Later,’ he said. ‘If you’re agreeable, that is.’

Rasch crossed his arms on his large chest. He was still smiling. ‘Perhaps we touch on subject briefly now. Then later more?’

‘Very well,’ Linney said.

‘My people are unhappy,’ Rasch remarked.

‘So are mine.’

‘Of course. We are all unhappy. My people see their money go on board a ship and then zoom, no more money. Swallowed up by the sea, no?’

Linney sipped his drink. He had invited Rasch out here to Bridgehampton for the sole purpose of exploring further fund-raising opportunities. It looked, as he’d told Harry Cairney at Roscommon, very bleak. The East Germans and their Soviet overlords could be very tight when it came to disbursing money.

‘There are some of us who do not like this kind of investment,’ Rasch went on. ‘Is money wasted, they say. Bad policy to throw money into Ireland. What is Ireland, they ask, but a wart in the Irish Sea? Now, these people are very very happy because they can …’ Rasch faltered.

‘Gloat?’ Linney suggested.

‘Indeed.’ Rasch put his empty glass down. They gloat. ‘They say security is bad and Ireland is unworthy of money anyway and why spend more?’

Linney made a little gesture with his hand. This business about the missing money nagged at him. He’d always enjoyed a good working relationship with his contributors but now, because one of the Fund-raisers had committed an act of treachery, all that was threatened. So far as Linney was concerned, the most likely candidate was Mulhaney. But in the absence of any hard evidence, what could he do about his suspicions? Big Jock was devious and greedy and he’d been plundering Teamster funds in the North-East for years. Linney would have liked to get Big Jock in some white-tiled, soundproofed cellar and hammer the fucking truth out of him.

Something else crossed his mind now. It was the two M-16A2s he had inside the house. It was no major deal, but about six months ago he’d come into possession of the two automatic rifles as well as a half dozen Fabrique Nationale assault rifles, those lovely Belgian babies, from a gun dealer he’d met at a survivalist training-camp in the Poconos. The dealer, who was the kind of man Linney ran into at these camps, where quiet machismo and boastful innuendo were the common currency of conversation, claimed he had a shipment of a hundred guns he was interested in selling to any interested party, if such a thing could be arranged. Linney, with more bravado than prudence, had allowed – with a small show of self-importance – that he was at least in the position of exploring the possibility of sending the guns to a buyer he knew in Ireland. He offered to transport the two automatic rifles and the six FN weapons as samples and if there was interest he’d get back to the dealer. All this was discussed discreetly, and it had intrigued Linney enormously to be involved in the clandestine business of running guns.

He’d taken the weapons, and sent the FN rifles to the address of an acquaintance in Cork, but he’d kept the M-16A2s for himself because they were prized weapons and difficult to acquire. Linney had paid cash for all the guns and hadn’t heard from the gun merchant again. Nor had he been surprised, because those kinds of deals fell through more frequently than they ever came to fruition. But the thing that worried him slightly now was the possibility of this business coming to light. He hadn’t done anything dishonest. He’d simply kept the guns he wanted for himself and sent the rest. And he hadn’t screwed the Irish out of any money to do so, which was something he’d never dream of doing. But they were a sensitive, touchy crew in the old country, and if they heard that two precious samples of the M-16A2 had been diverted, they could quite possibly be upset. When it came to The Cause, the people in Ireland hated the idea of anybody fucking with it. And Linney’s decision to keep the two guns could be interpreted as interference. It wasn’t much – but it bothered Linney. What if they’d heard over in Ireland about the two samples they never received? What if, in the murky world of gun-dealing, information had come up? What if the gun-dealer asked some Irish acquaintance By the way, what did you think of the M-16A2s?

It wasn’t likely. But Nicholas Linney’s mind had a twist that often exaggerated possibilities. He had the thought that if they found out about the two guns, they could leap to the conclusion that Linney wasn’t altogether loyal – and that could perhaps lead to more stinging accusations. Such as the hijacking of a small ship. The idea of being falsely accused filled him with a certain little jolt of excitement. It wasn’t going to happen that way, of course, but the possibility was enough to increase the voltage of his adrenalin.

‘More contributions are conditional,’ Rasch was saying. He beamed as if he were pleased with his mastery of English. ‘One, your security measures in the future we must approve.’

‘In triplicate?’ Linney asked.

Rasch didn’t know the word so he ignored it. ‘And two, no more money will be donated until you have catched the criminals and they are very punished.’

Nicholas Linney pulled a sliver of mint leaf from his glass and rolled it between his hands. How could security plans be submitted to some fucking committee in East Berlin? Apart from the fact that such a process would take forever, Linney realised that with so many people involved agreements could never be reached. The whole business of raising money would become bogged down in forms, those fucking forms of which the East Europeans were so fond and which seemed to Linney the paper foundation on which all Communism was built. If the Arab patrons were going to be as difficult as the East Europeans, you could practically kiss everything off. Linney sniffed mint on the palms of his hands. He was suddenly very impatient and restless and more than a little annoyed by the way things were turning out.

Rasch settled back in the chaise-longue. ‘I must know if you are soon catching the pirates. Is expected of me.’

‘That’s a police matter, Gustav.’ Even as he said this Linney knew that no American agency, neither the FBI nor the cops nor the Coast Guard, gave a flying fuck about a ship with Liberian registry and an Irish crew that had been attacked in international waters.

‘No,’ Rasch said. ‘Is a matter of your own house being in order, Nicholas.’

Linney said nothing. He was thinking of the two M-16A2s he had in his study.

Your own house in order, he thought.

He looked down over the tennis-court at the willow trees that marked his property line. There was an iron fence beyond the trees. It wasn’t going to keep anyone out who was determined to get in, such as this Irishman old Harry had mentioned. Let him show his face around here, Linney thought. Let him try. He had enough weapons stashed inside the house to keep a goddam army at bay for days. And for quite some time now, in fact ever since he’d been rejected by the draft board for Vietnam because of fallen arches, he’d been frustrated by the fact that all he ever got to shoot were watermelons and cantaloupes and plastic bottles filled with water. It was time to ponder a different kind of target.

The Irishman. Linney had spent some time trying to imagine the guy’s state of mind. He’d reached the conclusion that the Irishman was going to treat each one of the Fund-raisers as a suspect. He wasn’t going to come off like some tightly-wrapped detective with a few penetrating questions to ask and leave it at that. No, this fucker was going to be hard and menacing, which was a prospect Nicholas Linney enjoyed. Besides, Linney didn’t put a whole lot of faith in the value of the Fundraisers’ anonymity. Secrecy always had a weakness in it somewhere. And the weakness here was the priest, Joseph Tumulty, who was the liaison between the Americans and the IRA. Sometimes Linney got the impression that Tumulty knew a little more than he ever said. He’d always meant to get rid of Tumulty and strengthen that weak link in the chain, but he’d never quite done it – and he knew why. It was simply that he liked the vulnerability in the chain because it gave everything a delicious edge, a little tinge of danger in the otherwise mundane chore of delivering large sums of cash. He enjoyed that. It provided spice during the cold nights when you were skulking around Maine with briefcases stuffed with dough.

Nicholas Linney finished his drink. This Irishman is going to suspect everybody, he thought. Including me. Let him come here. Let him show his face.

He turned to Rasch and smiled. ‘Let’s go indoors,’ he said. ‘We can talk about all this later.’

Rasch stood up hastily. ‘I have been waiting.’

Linney draped an arm loosely around Rasch’s shoulder as they moved across the terrace. Sliding glass doors opened into a lounge the length of the house. It was furnished in pastels, the minimalist look, lean chairs and low-slung coffee tables and a couple of sparse paintings of the Anaemic School. Linney liked understatement. He had no taste for the brash. He liked clean lines and crisp angles. Even in his politics he favoured simple alignments and economy. His activities on behalf of the Fund-raisers, for example, served two purposes at once. They satisfied his Irishness, handed down to him from his father, Brigadier Mad Jack Linney of the IRA, a dashing figure with a black eye-patch who had been shot to death in Belfast in October 1955, and they created useful bonds with the Arabs and the East Europeans which helped in his other commercial enterprises. He often steered foreign capital into foundering Western businesses threatened by either bankruptcy or takeover. It was amazing sometimes to Linney how much Eastern European money had been used to help pump new blood into the arteries of capitalism.

Passing a large salt-water fishtank in which a variety of exotic species flickered back and forth, Linney walked across the floor to a door on the other side of the room. It opened into a very large bedroom. Two girls, neither of whom was more than fifteen, sat listening to rock music. They were easily corrupted, Linney thought. When he first brought them to this country, they had been shy and retiring, delicate little things who understood nothing about Western ways. Now Linney wondered how long he could keep them before they wanted their freedom, a Western concept that, like rock music and whirlpool baths and TV, they’d grasped all too quickly.

Linney indicated for them to come out into the lounge. They wore simple pastel dresses, so that they were coordinated with the room they entered. Their hair, shiny and black and long, lay in an uncluttered way over their shoulders, exactly as Linney liked it. Each girl was long-legged and lithe and small-breasted. When they smiled they did so in a shy manner, turning their dark brown eyes down. They were beautiful and still acquiescent in a way one rarely found among Western girls these days.

‘Ah,’ Rasch said. ‘Supreme.’

‘I’m glad you approve,’ Linney said.

‘Will they undress?’ Rasch asked.

The girls took off their dresses and stood in white underwear that made their skin seem starkly ochre.

‘They have names?’ Rasch asked.

Linney shrugged. ‘I call them Dancer and Prancer.’

‘Pardon?’ Rasch said.

‘Not their real names. I bought them in Phnom Penh.’

‘A fine purchase,’ Rasch said. ‘Very fine. Is no problem to bring them to United States?’

‘There were visa considerations,’ Linney answered.

‘Paperwork.’ Rasch looked as if he understood the labyrinthine requirements of bureaucracy.

‘Which one do you favour?’ Linney asked.

The East German strolled around the girls, nodding his head. This was precisely what he had come to Nicholas Linney’s home for, the satisfaction of appetites that went undernourished in East Berlin, where he had a wife who resembled a Sumo wrestler. He weighed a delicate breast in his hand, fingered a fine hip, patted a lean buttock. The girls didn’t move. They were accustomed to being assessed by Linney’s associates, men of Western culture who regarded them like oxen.

Rasch turned to Linney with a grin on his face. ‘Such pretty little birds,’ he said. ‘I like them both.’

Patchogue, Long Island

‘It’s not Jig’s style,’ Frank Pagan said. ‘For one thing, he never claims he’s made a kill on behalf of the Irish Republican Army. He never says anything like that. If he had reason to kill somebody in Albany, why would he change his usual message?’

Zuboric, sitting in the passenger seat of Pagan’s Cadillac, had his hands clenched tensely in his lap because he didn’t like Pagan’s idea of driving, which was to occupy the fast lane at around ninety-five miles an hour and keep a leaden foot on the gas-pedal, ignoring anything in his way. Pagan was a fast man on the horn, thrusting his palm down and holding it there until the driver in front switched lanes.

‘If it wasn’t Jig, who was it?’ Zuboric asked.

Pagan shrugged. He had the alarming habit of not looking where he was going. He forced the Cadillac up to a shaky eighty-five and turned his face to Zuboric. ‘I don’t have an answer to that. None of it makes sense. I can’t imagine some local IRA cell in Albany doing anything like this. I can’t even imagine the existence of a cell in Albany. Christ, what would they do anyway in the middle of New York State? Hold jumble sales to raise funds for weapons? Coconut shies? Sell little flags you can stick in your lapel?’

‘Watch the road, Frank,’ Zuboric said.

Pagan banged his horn again, and the car in front, a canary-yellow Corvette, moved into the slow lane. ‘Another thing that bothers me is the connection. An old FUV man turns up dead in Albany at the same time as Ivor McInnes is here in New York.’

They don’t have to be connected,’ Zuboric said. He favoured the Jig hypothesis plain and simple. It was the only logical one and besides he was tired of bird-dogging Pagan. How sweet it would be to have a quick wrap on this whole business and be rid of Frank fucking Pagan once and for all. Then he could go back to the tangled affair that was his own life. A topless bar, for Chrissakes. Shaking her wonderful tits for all and sundry to see. Drooling men with hard-ons under their overcoats. Zuboric couldn’t take any of this. He had to get Charity away from that life.

‘Maybe not,’ Pagan answered.

‘Jig had time to kill a man in Albany and then get to New York.’

‘He had time, certainly,’ Pagan said. ‘I don’t know why he’d want to kill Fitzjohn, though.’

‘Consider this.’ Zuboric opened his eyes. ‘Jig finds out this character Fitzjohn had something to do with the missing money. Fitzjohn won’t tell him anything. Jig kills him.’

Pagan was unconvinced. ‘Why kill somebody who might have information you want? What sense does that make? If Fitzjohn knew something, Jig wouldn’t kill him. He’d try everything he could to get the information out of the man, but he wouldn’t kill him. That would be a sheer waste of resources.’ Pagan rubbed his eyes, taking both hands off the wheel to do so. Zuboric sat straight forward in his seat like a drowning man looking for something to clutch.

‘Frank, for Chrissakes.’

Pagan returned his hands to the wheel. ‘It just doesn’t add up. Jig came back to St. Finbar’s for two reasons. One was guns. The other was a name. And Tumulty only knew one name. Nicholas Linney. He said he’d never heard of Fitzjohn, so he couldn’t tell Jig that one.’

‘Maybe Jig brought the name with him from Ireland,’ Zuboric said. He felt weary. It seemed to him that the whole Irish situation, at least so far as it had been imported into the United States, was too complex to contemplate. Complicated allegiances, obscure motivations. He understood it was best to keep it all simple in his mind. It was Catholic against Protestant, basically. Any side issues, any sudden tributaries, were not worth exploring if you wanted to retain your sanity, a possession Frank Pagan had almost relinquished.

‘If he knew of Fitzjohn before he left Ireland, why would he go to all the trouble of getting a name from Tumulty? He understood the risks involved in going to Canal Street. Why take those risks if he already had a lead to the missing money? And if he did have a lead, why kill it?’ Pagan peered into the rearview mirror. He changed lanes abruptly, overtook a large Mayflower van, then swung back out into the fast lane and gave the big Caddie more gas.

Zuboric had an image of the Cadillac, and all who sailed in her, crashing off the highway and plummeting down an embankment. A fiery death. This whole trip across Long Island wouldn’t have been necessary if Pagan had used his gun on Jig the first time round, a perception that made Zuboric resentful.

‘Maybe we’re going to Bridgehampton for nothing.’

Pagan didn’t think so. He had the feeling that poor Joe Tumulty, faced with premature eviction from St. Finbar’s and the end of all his humanitarian labours, had finally been truthful. And if it hadn’t been for Artie Zuboric blurting out Jig’s name at that first meeting with Tumulty, if Pagan had been given the chance to take slower steps, more circumspect ones, the chance to run things his own way, then Tumulty would have been less defensive and more easily caught unawares. And perhaps Jig would have been simpler to snare. Hindsight, blessed hindsight, Pagan thought. It was an overrated quality.

‘We’ll find out soon enough,’ he said.

‘What if Jig’s already been there?’ Zuboric asked.

‘That’s something else we’ll find out,’ Pagan replied.

He pressed the gas pedal to the floor, rolled his window down, turned on the radio just as the town of Patchogue slipped past on the edge of Highway 27, and heard the sound of Freddie Common singing Palisades Park, an anthem from an innocent time.

Roscommon, New York

Celestine Cairney listened to her husband’s music drift out through the open door of his library. It seemed more melancholy than usual this morning. It fitted Harry’s mood, certainly. Ever since he’d learned that his son had gone abruptly in the middle of the night he’d retreated behind the wall of his music, his silence chilly and his face pale and haunted. Patrick’s manner of departure had disappointed him. No farewell. No final hug. No promises to keep in touch.

She stood on the threshold of the room, looking across the floor at her husband. He sat in a large wing-back chair beside the fireplace, unaware of her. He appeared very frail, his skinny white hands clasped in his lap, his eyes closed under white lids, his head moving very slightly in time to the music. She didn’t have the heart to talk with him. She had no way of explaining Patrick’s departure to him, even if she’d wanted to.

She went down the long flight of stairs to the hallway below. Inside the sitting room she stood at the window and looked out over the expanse of land that sloped down to the shore of the lake. She twisted her fingers together. When she tried to remember her visit to Patrick Cairney’s bedroom her memories were evasive. The taste of the man, the way he felt – these things came back to her with a clarity. But there was something else that eluded her. What did she want to call it? His essence? His private self? Perhaps it was the simple mystery of the unattainable, longing for the thing you can never have.

No. It had nothing to do with the ache of remembered desire or the way it clawed at her heart or the fact that Patrick Cairney was her husband’s son.

It was another kind of mystery altogether, concrete and tangible.

She pressed her cheek against the cold glass. Outside, the early morning sun had a faint mist hanging around it. A veil. Like the veil Patrick Cairney drew over himself.

She turned away from the window. Her hand went out to the telephone and lingered over it. The obvious place to begin was with the archaeological departments of universities, but today was Saturday and those offices would be shut. It would have to wait, she thought. She sat down, struggling with her impatience and the sense of excitement she suddenly felt. She knew she was on to something, but precisely what she couldn’t quite say. It was almost as if Patrick Cairney were a book she had somehow opened in the middle at a suspenseful part, a tease that would compel her to read to the end where everything enigmatic would be clarified in one stunning revelation.

Harry came inside the room, moving slowly. Celestine took his hand and held it against her breasts.

‘I can’t understand it,’ he said. ‘Why did he leave like that?’

Celestine didn’t speak.

Cairney inclined his head so that it touched his wife’s shoulder. ‘Did he strike you as being unhappy about something? Did I say something to upset him?’

She shook her head and said no, he hadn’t.

‘There’s something restless about that boy,’ Cairney said. ‘There’s always been this restless centre to him. It’s like he’s never fully at ease anywhere.’

‘I can’t imagine why,’ Celestine replied.

Harry Cairney, who felt very old this morning, closed his eyes. His sense of unhappiness was strong, like a blade in his chest. He’d been looking forward to spending the morning with his son, talking of his favourite subject, Ireland, reminiscing, reliving a past that was going to die when he did. He’d awakened that morning with old memories vitally refreshed, things he wanted to tell Patrick, sights and sounds he wanted to convey to the boy – the clattering old trams that used to run all over the city with their Amstel Lager Beer and Bovril and Neaves Food signs, along the North Circular Road and Rathmines Road and Sackville Street out to Phoenix Park (although he couldn’t remember the exact routes now, as if the geography of his beloved Dublin had collapsed in his memory), the smells of loose tea in Sheridan’s on North Earl Street, how he’d bought his first real pair of shoes at the Popular Boot Emporium on South Great George’s Street, and Croke Park where on March 14, 1921, the British had surrounded a crowd of ten thousand at a football game and opened fire, volley after volley, wounding and killing the blameless. Fourteen dead. Fifty-seven injured. His memory had become all at once a crowded place, but what goddam good were memories when you didn’t have your boy to share them with? Patrick would have been interested in hearing these things. He was always interested in his father’s recollections. He loved Ireland just as the old man did.

Celestine put her arms around Harry and drew him against her body. ‘I’m sure he’ll call,’ she said.

She stroked the side of his face very deliberately, almost as if she were seeking resemblances between the old man to whom she was married and the young man who had left her, in the dead of night, with enigmas.

‘Love me,’ Harry Cairney said.

‘Here? Now?’

‘Here and now.’

She put her hand between the folds of his robe, cupping his testicles in her palm. His skin was cold. She worked her fingers over the shaft of his penis, which was infirm and soft until she began to stroke it energetically. She listened to the low sound he made as he grew excited – a quiet moaning, a whispering of words she could never quite catch. His breath quickened and there was rasping from his tired lungs.

She parted his robe and went down on her knees. Looking upwards once at the whiteness of his body, the sagging pectoral muscles, the folds of his neck, she shut her eyes and transported herself to an imagined place and time, where she knelt, exactly as she was doing now, at the feet of another man, whose body was Patrick Cairney’s.